AppDynamics Reviews

We use AppDynamics mainly to monitor the application performance.

The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is its ability to track the transactions between different applications.

AppDynamics should improve its ability to track all the transactions.

We have been using AppDynamics for approximately three years.

AppDynamics is a stable product. We rarely had any issues with the solution.

I rate AppDynamics ten out of ten for scalability.

Getting a response from the solution's technical support team is harder and takes longer. Since the solution has a structural support model, it requires some layers of escalation to get the correct response.

Neutral

The solution's initial setup is easy. However, it is harder than Checkmk because it needs to install the agent.

The solution's initial deployment takes about three to four months. However, it's a work in progress because new applications are added every time.

AppDynamics is an expensive solution.

AppDynamics is deployed on-cloud in our organization.

Overall, I rate AppDynamics a nine out of ten.

We use AppDynamics for monitoring application performance, end-users, and infrastructure. The product has analytics covering all these areas. 

We're a large organization, so we appreciate AppDynamics' wide coverage. It may not work great in all areas, but it has broad coverage. We use the same dataset for different use case aspects. That is the beauty of AppDynamics. You can coordinate APM, EUM, and infrastructure through one dataset. 

AppDynamics not so great with cloud technology. AppDynamics works very well with the on-premise technologies, but it is behind the curve in the emerging cloud features. 

The cloud is one area where I think AppD is not that great.

Basic monitoring is the main thing, but nowadays, everybody talks about observability. I'm not sure how well AppD fits into the so-called observability trend. The track-and-trace mechanism works very well with on-premises technologies but not so great with the cloud.

Cloud monitoring is becoming more critical. Competitors can pose a big challenge. AppDynamics is a top product, but they need to maintain the same trend in the cloud area, where it's not that great.

We have been using AppDynamics for four to five years.

AppDynamics works reasonably good.

AppDynamics is scalable.

We use the SaaS model, which is the most common way to deploy AppDynamics. Infrastructure setup was not an issue as we chose the SaaS model. We don't have any concerns in terms of infrastructure. 

We only needed to deploy the agent, which was relatively straightforward. I wouldn't say it was effortless, but it wasn't complicated, either. We made a package to automate the deployment, which worked pretty well for us.

I don't know the details about the pricing.

I rate AppDynamics eight out of 10. 

Public Cloud

The big problem we've always had is connecting the dots, so to speak. We've never been able to say that the application is having an issue before somebody calls us and tells us, and that's extremely embarrassing. Plus we're a little late to the table. With AppDynamics, you can be able to tell whether they're having errors or whether they're having a slow response time. 

We're able to detect issues now before the customer calls us. Another thing that this helps us with is the fact that there are some conditions we see in the database, for instance, locking and blocking and high CPU, that we've always had been trying to correlate this high CPU and high blocking. We were always wondering: is that necessarily bad or is it just kind of a warning sign or what is that? With this product, we're able to correlate everything with what the application is saying and saying, "we've got blocking, we've got high errors, we've got high response time, therefore it's probably a database and therefore it's probably an issue." Before we had this product, we weren't able to do that.

This solution is great at alerting us to issues and letting us know if anything is correlated.

The release management capabilities are great. If you do a new release, you have to ask: how's will it perform? Is it going to have problems? Before it was hard to actually measure. Now we're able to precisely measure the performance and also the error rate. That's very helpful.

It's also helpful with building dashboards. You can build dashboards for different parts of the company, for the operations, for the application, for the infrastructure, all the above.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The stability has been good.

At first, I thought it had a high learning curve. However, it's not so much. It's just different. It's different from all the other tools and it's just not as intuitive as it could be. I'm not sure how you fix that. For instance, the training on the dashboards that is provided could be a little bit better, as could the use cases. They should have some good examples out there. As it is right now, I had to scour YouTube to find some stuff.

I've been using the solution for a few years. I started using it around 2015.

The stability has been great. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable.

I'm relatively new at this company, and we're doing a POC on it right now. We have it on about 75 machines. In terms of scalability, my guess is the architecture will allow it, is t's in the cloud. It should scale. However, I really don't know here in the company where I use it. I know other companies have scaled thousands. I personally haven't experienced that myself, however.

As it is going well, we're likely to expand it. That said, we're still just in the POC phase.

The initial setup is pretty simple. It's not overly complex. Implementing it shouldn't be a problem.

In terms of deployment and maintenance, the team is pretty much my team. It's a site reliability engineering team, and it's pretty small. The people who'll actually be maintaining it will not only be implementing, so to speak, but utilizing it and customizing it. That will ultimately also include a lot of other teams, like your operation, application, and infrastructure teams.

I can't speak to the exact cost of the solution. It's not a part of the product I handle.

I would advise those considering the solution to be patient and stick with it. A lot of these tools are pretty simple, however, they're simply used. For instance, they measure CPU and network and memory and stuff like that. The graphics may be pretty flashy, however, it doesn't provide the hardcore data that AppDynamics does. That's why you need to kind of just relax and stay with it a bit and you'll be successful. If you're just looking for something flashy to give you back immediate results that you can use today or tomorrow, it's probably not the right fit.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

It is primarily on-premises. We've been evaluating cloud, and I've got one application that's using a cloud-based solution, but the bulk of it is on-premises.

The business transaction that stands between multiple applications is proving to be most valuable.

Its resiliency can be improved. We're told that the best we can do with an on-prem solution is to have a hot standby that requires a manual switchover. So, it is a do-it-yourself Ikea model of maintaining data consistency between two servers, without having low balance or failover considerations for an on-prem solution.

There are a lot of capabilities and features that I need on a day-to-day basis that just are not included in the product. I have seen these capabilities and features in multiple other solutions. For number one, it has to be FedRAMP certified. We've been working around that with security and everything else. So, we need a solution that is fully supported in a secure federal environment.

I have been using it heavily for about two and a half years.

It was complex. There is nothing simple about this type of instrumentation.

We had professional services from AppDynamics or Cisco for mostly on-prem expertise.

I would advise others to take a higher systems-level approach to understand exactly what is needed in the way of instrumentation and monitoring within your enterprise. You can have a point solution like AppDynamics, and this is the big picture of the entire data flow throughout the system.

I would rate AppDynamics a six out of 10.

On-premises

Part of it is the ease of adoption. We were a big CA house beforehand. We had a massive implementation of CA APM, but nobody uses it. We ditched CA in favor of AppDynamics. We compared New Relic and AppDynamics. AppDynamics is, in my opinion, far superior.

The ease of adoption has already picked up in my company. Bear in mind, we're probably about nine months into the project; it's probably more widely used than CA was after three years. So, that is, for me, the prime benefit. We are actually getting people to use the tool and get value out of it; it's not just shelf ware.

As any APM tool should, it provides root cause analysis. It enables you to reduce your mean time to resolution. It enables you to identify performance bottlenecks, even in pre-production environments. It generally helps provide better applications, better code, to customers; things we weren't really getting out of CA. The 2 or 3 teams who were using it got some of that value, but the rest of the organization just didn't. Now, we've got teams who had never picked up an APM product already getting value out of it, literally in a matter of days after installation.

I think it's because of the ease of use. It provides useful information straight away, quite deliberately so. It's much easier to navigate, it's much easier to understand the data that's being returned to you, and I think that really helped teams and individuals not be afraid of it.

Part of it is support for more modern languages. Node is lagging behind. And I think clarity on exactly where they intend to go, as well, because the relationship with other vendors like Splunk is a little bit grey at the moment. I'm curious as to where they're going with that and whether they intend to work as partners with them, or actually impose on their space.

To get a higher rating, they'd have to fix the Node issues, they'd have to fix some framework issues; it doesn’t work very well with Vertex 3, for instance. Tweaks like that. In any case, nothing's ever perfect.

We haven’t really had any stability or scalability issues. We're using the SaaS offering rather than on-premise, which obviously takes away a lot of that headache. The SaaS operations team are pretty good. The SaaS Operations team isn't somebody you directly interact with, but through the account management team and through the support teams.

I’m very happy with the technical support. There have been a couple of incidents – there are always a couple of incidents – but actually they've been very responsive, they've been very easy to work with, and happy to take feedback, both positive and negative.

I did the original CA APM installation four years ago; and then was involved in the RFP process, the initial commercial negotiations with AppD, and therefore the initial set up, as well, for the first few applications.

AppDynamics initial setup was very easy. There are some niggles. Some of the modern languages are less easy to use. Node is a bit of a sticking point with us at the moment, but installing it on a JVM, for instance, is absolutely a piece of cake.

As I’ve mentioned, we've looked at New Relic. Previously, a few years ago, we looked at Dynatrace. We've had a relationship with CA for 10 years, something like that.

We definitely wanted to move away from the CA legacy. Of the three main tools that are modern and out there for APM, you’ve got New Relic, Dynatrace and AppDynamics. Dynatrace isn't really in the same space, in my opinion; that's much more pre-production, code-level stuff. Between New Relic and AppDynamics, it was quite close. There are still teams in my organization who prefer New Relic, but as a whole solution, as a whole suite, I think AppDynamics gives you more flexibility, more in-depth visibility, and I think it has a brighter future.

Think about what it is you're doing beforehand. Plan it a little bit. One of the slightly strange problems that some of the early teams ran into was fundamentally misunderstanding the application tier and node hierarchy in AppDynamics. You ended up with some very strangely named applications. Read that one paragraph on each of those. Work out what it is you're doing, and then it all springs to life. Also, talk to other teams who've done it.

We also use AppDynamics database monitoring. We use the machine agents. I think that's pretty much everything we've got. I’m generally happy with them. Every tool has its limitations and you want more.

I think the ability to quickly correlate and introspect into what's going on inside a Java container is the most valuable feature for us. We haven't fully leveraged it yet for monitoring and altering which was one of the main reason we wanted AppDynamics. These features are hooked up but we haven't seen a lot of action in production yet. We currently use it more for the pre-production performance troubleshooting and debugging. So far its been the majority of our usage.

In production we haven't had any serious issues which caused us to lean on it heavily but in pre-production we had a few big performance degradation problems. AppDynamics was crucial for us pinpointing root cause and fixing it. We probably wouldn't have been able to go live as swiftly as we did without AppDynamics.

I think the only feedback from my team has been that it's not an HTML based UI right now, so it's limited on mobile devices. An HTML 4 or 5 based interface would be great.

Part of why we chose AppDynamics was because we felt that they were above all other products. We have been using it in trial mode or pre-production mode for quite a while - almost a year now, and we've been using it heavily since January. We've been using it in production since the end of April.

Deployment was fairly easy. Our team learned how to use AppDynamics fairly quick. We're now proficient in it.

We haven't seen AppDynamics crash or have any problems so far.

We're currently running relatively low numbers, under 40 DBMS in production and pre-production and we haven't really scaled yet. So far AppDynamics has been great with what we have.

Customer Service: Customer service has been good. We've actually been less capable of keeping up with them then they have been with us. They've been great about reaching out and following up.Technical Support: Technical support has been just as great as their customer service. We've been able to get what we need when we need it.

This was our departments first jump in with an APM solution. Some of us have some experience with New Relic (from when we were in other departments which have 100's or 1000's of licenses). We started from scratch with an RFP and met everybody- we met many vendors and finally evaluated AppDynamics, dynaTrace and New Relic.

We didn't have any issues with the initial setup. The first time when we did our POC, AppDynamics came in and sat with us for a day and set it all up. This gave us a lot of experience with it. They came back later to help us set up the final version but at that point we were already trained.

We haven't quantitatively measured it yet. Qualitatively, for the helpful times that we've used it, we like it.

Day to day costs- vm's we pay for to run it and license costs. A little bit of administrative overhead but once it gets set up it's good to go.

The model that we used to do the POC and prototype to test it out first helped to get us familiar with the tool, familiar with it and trained on it. AppDynamics suggested it and said they could come in and help - we accepted!

We use the platform for infrastructure monitoring purposes.

There could log management features included in the product.

We have been using AppDynamics for one month.

AppDynamics is a stable product. It doesn't have a lot of bugs. We can fix the bugs at a code level whenever we encounter them with our expertise. It provides an ease of installation as well.

I rate the platform's scalability an eight out of ten.

Dynatrace works better compared to AppDynamics. While using AppDynamics, we have to install different external agents for managing, customizing, and monitoring logs. In comparison, we must install only one agent to carry out the processes while using Dynatrace.

The initial setup process is easy once learned. At the moment, I am a new AppDynamics user and am exploring more ways to make the process easier.

The product is more expensive than Datadog but lower than Dynatrace.

It is a wonderful monitoring tool that manages various aspects such as system resources (CPU, RAM), mobile performance, and infrastructure monitoring. It provides ease of use, alerting capabilities, integration support, and scalability. Thus, it is already maintained. It doesn't provide log management services; we have to install different types of agents for business processes. It is not a cloud-native platform like AWS, GCP, etc. I rate AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

I use it to solve issues that my clients encounter, such as application slowness. It helps me identify whether the issue is related to the database, server, or CPU memory management.

Moreover, I use it to find solutions and provide recommendations to my colleagues.

This solution not only provides answers but also provides sensor data. This allows us to quickly resolve issues that developers may take a long time to solve. In essence, it helps us address problems at an early stage. Moreover, it is especially useful in production servers where real users encounter numerous issues.

There are numerous issues that arise during peak times, and AppDynamics makes it easy for us to identify the problem areas and determine the appropriate resolutions. This is how it helps us find solutions effectively.

Regarding improvements, I believe the dashboard could be more optimized. Although it claims to be optimized, I think it should be even more convenient, especially for advanced users. 

Additionally, the documentation can be a bit challenging. It would be beneficial if the documentation provided clear solutions for every problem. In my opinion, the documentation could be improved.

I worked with AppDynamics for around three to four months. I have been working directly with it for the past year.

I use the latest version. 

It is stable, but the only downside is the licensing part. Other than that, it's a reliable product with no major issues.

It is highly scalable. There are no additional limitations in terms of scalability.

In my company, we have around 50 to 100 clients using this tool. Although it can be a bit expensive, it is still being used extensively to solve various problems.

It's straightforward, not too complex. However, it requires proper learning to effectively use it.

The deployment process typically takes around one to two hours, depending on the system. Once the setup is complete, we can proceed with the implementation process.

First, there's a need for basic knowledge of OS, especially for Windows and .NET. Additionally, understanding concepts like Dynatrace and AppDynamics, their functioning, and architecture is crucial. These are the key methods involved in the deployment process. If it's a cloud solution, then AWS or Azure are the recommended options. If it's on-premises, then using either Linux or Windows is ideal.

For deployment, we need to focus on event configuration, which involves learning about network events and configuration. Once we understand this, we can proceed with the deployment setup. There is no frequent deployment. In case the deployment is not satisfactory, we may need to learn about Linux and Windows concepts.

I have seen some ROI. 

It is an expensive solution. It's on a yearly basis. We need to pay for it annually.

I have used Dynatrace. The main difference between the two is that AppDynamics utilizes different data mechanisms, while Dynatrace uses a unified agent approach. This simplifies the complexity of Dynatrace, providing more visibility and root cause analysis. In terms of benefits, AppDynamics is more scalable than analytics.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

Hybrid Cloud

Microsoft Azure